Comments on: Hack Manifesto Redux

By: In Defense of Genre, and Artistic Compression « Deadline Dames

In Defense of Genre, and Artistic Compression « Deadline Dames — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:11:16 +0000

[...] round off last week’s post from the vaults, here is the post that immediately followed a year ago. I had planned to wax rhapsodically bitchy [...]

By: LizzieBelle

LizzieBelle — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:30:54 +0000

Yes. Thank you.

By: ilona andrews

ilona andrews — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:29:51 +0000

I can’t see the entry with flames. Why, oh why must you torture me so, you hack, you?

By: PJ

PJ — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:08:08 +0000

What you said. With whipped cream and cherries on top. Or without, since we’re being deceptively simple.

By: FD

FD — Fri, 22 May 2009 20:40:28 +0000

One of the things that draws me to genre fiction, as opposed to literary fiction, is my irredeemable love of story. If I want to read pretty words, I’ll read poetry, (and do sometimes) but in my oh-so-humble book-buying opinion, most lit fic writers need to learn to kill their darlings.

It’s funny how word use changes; a hack is a pleasure horse now, meant to be elegant, graceful, comfortable, reliably unflappable, enjoyable to ride and have ‘presence’. I don’t see that that spoils the translation to the written word though.

By: Tania

Tania — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:45:47 +0000

Hail to the hacks! Without them, I’d have nothing to read. Also, my high school nickname was Bitch because I felt about that term the same way you do and took it as a compliment whenever someone called me that. Eventually, it just kinda stuck. : )

By: martianmooncrab

martianmooncrab — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:45:45 +0000

You are in my top ten for Hack.. top 5 for those still writing, some of the best Hacks churned out prose by the word to make a living. Golden Age of… fill in the blank…

I want an author to produce books, not be delicately babied to deliver a book every 10-20 years. I may not live that long, I want to read NOW. I want story NOW.

In non-fiction they have popular writers and scholarly writers, the trick is to make the work more accessible to a wider audience without dumbing it down.

By: Sherri

Sherri — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:34:51 +0000

Right this moment, for as long as the glow lasts, you are my favorite person in the world for writing that. “Nuff said.

By: Jhada Addams

Jhada Addams — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:08:48 +0000

Thank you for writing this! It is splendid.

By: Barb Hendee

Barb Hendee — Fri, 22 May 2009 18:56:32 +0000

I absolutely, absolutely, “shout to roof tops” agree that good writing is deceptively simple.

J.C. and I have gone a few rounds debating this argument. I don’t want to pick on him because he is a brilliant story teller, but in his earlier writing life, he fell prey to the lure of “impressive, complex sentence structure” and the need to show the reader his high IQ.

Understandably . . . this did not go over well.

He overcame about 90% of this urge when we started the Noble Dead Saga–mainly because he wanted to make a living.

My goal is to make the writing so deceptively easy to read that the reader forgets he/she is sitting in a chair reading a book. I want them lost in the the story, not struggling to appreciate my fine, pretty sentences.